"To be a
patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "
Our country, right or
wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that
phrase is an insult to the nation."
from "Glances
at History," 1906
"A patriot sets himself apart in his own country under his own flag,
sneers at other nations and keeps an army of uniformed assassins on
hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries and
keep them from grabbing slices of his. In the intervals between
campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the
universal brotherhood of man' - with his mouth."
The Lowest Animal
"For in a Republic, who is 'the country?' Is it the Government which is
for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant -
merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine
what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who
isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is
wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this
and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified
and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men
label you as they may."
"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown
thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie
told well is immortal."
Advice to Youth
"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still
exist, but you have ceased to live."
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the
newspaper you are misinformed."
Of a novel by Henry James: "Once you put it down, you can't pick it up."
"Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly
good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."
"Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is
oblivion."
"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is
far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor.
That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America
by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at
ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to
the
poorhouse."
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders."
"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter."
"I can live for two months on a good compliment."
"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
"The government of my country snubs honest simplicity, but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two."
'Roughing It'
"The Battle Hymn of
the Republic, Updated"
Mine eyes have seen the #### of the launching of the
Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has
scored;
His lust is marching on.
I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling
camps;
They have builded him an altar in the Eastern dews and damps;
I have read his doomful mission by the dim and flaring lamps-
His night is marching on.
I have read his bandit gospel writ in burnished rows of
steel:
"As ye deal with my pretensions, so with you my wrath shall deal;
Let the faithless son of Freedom crush the patriot with his heel;
Lo, Greed is marching on!"
We have legalized the strumpet and are guarding her
retreat;
Greed is seeking out commercial souls before his judgement seat;
O, be swift, ye clods, to answer him! be jubilant my feet!
Our god is marching on!
In a sordid slime harmonious Greed was born in yonder
ditch,
With a longing in his bosom-and for others' goods an itch.
As Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich -
Our god is marching on.
Twain penned this
parody of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," from the perspective of an
American industrialist in 1901, in the
wake of American imperialism in the Spanish and Philippine Wars
"There's one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him; if he says yes, you know he is crooked."
"Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
"Happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want."
"It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech."
"It is
by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three
unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,
and the prudence never to practice either of them."
"An
inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war."
from "Glances
at History," 1906
"Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough."
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
"To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both."
letter to Dr. John Brown, 1876
"Statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked,
and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and
will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of
them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just,
and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception."
from
"Chronicle of Young Satan"
"Man is the
only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the
only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold
blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal
that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers
of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no
quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood
off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with
his mouth."
from What Is Man?
"The
radical of one century is the conservative
of the next. The radical
invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts
them."
from
Notebook, 1898
"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society."
"There
are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's
notion that he less savage than the other savages."
from Following the
Equator
"The Gospel of
the Monarchical Patriotism is: "The King can do
no
wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant
change in the wording: "Our Country, right or wrong!"
"Patriotism
is
supporting your country all the time, and your government when it
deserves it."
"A man
can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't
legally be a Christian
and a patriot--except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth,
the other with the heart. The spirit of Christianity proclaims the
brotherhood of the race and the meaning of that strong word has not
been left to guesswork, but made tremendously definite- the Christian
must forgive his brother man all crimes he can imagine and commit, and
all insults he can conceive and utter- forgive these injuries how many
times?--seventy times seven--another way of saying there shall be no
limit to this forgiveness. That is the spirit and the law of
Christianity. Well--Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly
definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the
brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book
every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. Word it as
softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog
and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line
or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise,
and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of
patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's
line, it comes natural to him- he can live up to all its requirements
to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety
possible to him. The prayers
concealed in what I have been saying is, not that patriotism should
cease and not that the talk about universal brotherhood should cease,
but that the incongruous firm be dissolved and each limb of it be
required to transact business by itself, for the future."
from Mark Twain's
Notebook
"We teach
them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to
shout with the largest
crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly
as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We
teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt,
such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we
are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out
of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's
keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan."
from Mark Twain, a
Biography
"[Patriotism]
...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of
land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of
a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with
proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers"
who came to steal it and did--and became swelling-hearted patriots in
their turn."
from Mark Twain's
Notebook "Irreverence is
the champion of liberty and its only sure
defense." "Sometimes I
wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who
are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
"I am an anti-imperialist. I am
opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
quoted in A Pen Warmed Up in
Hell
"All war
must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal
animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if
you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it."
from "The
Private History of the Campaign That Failed"
"Before I had
chance in another war, the desire to kill people
to whom I had not been
introduced had passed away."
Autobiography of
Mark Twain
"In
the beginning of a change, the patriot is a
scarce man, and brave, and
hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for
then
it costs nothing to be a patriot."
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man."
"I
am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning
religion and politics
a man's reasoning powers are not above the
monkey's."
from Mark Twain in
Eruption
"Total abstinence
is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an
extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally
abstain from total abstinence itself."
"Man
is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in
his own country, under
his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous
uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other
people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in
the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood of his hands and
works for "the universal brotherhood of man"- with his mouth."
from "The
Lowest Animal"
"The
only difference between a tax man and a
taxidermist is that the
taxidermist
leaves the skin."
"In
India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into
use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between
weather
which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it
mushy."
"There
are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he
can't
afford it, and when he can."
"Pudd'nhead
Wilson's New Calendar"
"I
think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures
that
bring higher prices than any in the world."
"It could
probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly
native American criminal class except Congress."
from
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
"It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native
criminal class except Congress."
from More
Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
"Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out
in demagogues."
from
Notebook, 1868
"...I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my
mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature,
Congressman."
from
"Foster's Case", New York Tribune, 3/10/1873
"Good
breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how
little we think of the other person."
"Most
writers regard the truth
as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in
its use."
"In
Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but
the
Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they
have obtained from books of travel"
"I was
gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't
know."
from Life
on the Mississippi
"Suppose
you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I
repeat
myself."
"In
the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school
boards."
"Why
is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because
we are not the person involved."
"Heaven
goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog
would
go in."
Mark
Twain, in Albert B. Payne, Mark Twain: A biography, vol. 3. (1912)
"[He
was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he
was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity."
"I
have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never
intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome."
Mark
Twain, 70th birthday speech.
"The
man who does not read has no advantage over the man who can't read."
"For
in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for
the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a
servant--merely
a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is
right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its
function is to obey orders, not originate them."
"It
is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and
moral courage so rare."
"A
lie can travel half way around the world while the truth
is putting on
its shoes."
"Whenever
you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to
reform."
"He
was such a good man, people hated to see him coming."
"I
did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved
of it."
"If
you tell the truth
you don't have to remember anything."
"Most
people are bothered by those passages in scriptures
which they cannot understand. But for me, I always notice that the
passages
in scripture which trouble me the most are those that I do understand."
"Always
do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest."
"Few
things are harder to put up with than a good example."
"I
have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
"Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."
